Quotes About Information

Come negli stati totalitari, anche nelle società aperte esiste la censura, anche se assume forme diverse. Le domande offensive o imbarazzanti per il sistema dottrinale sono bloccate. Le informazioni scomode vengono soppresse. Non serve guardare lontano per giungere a questa conclusione; basta analizzare onestamente che cosa viene riportato dai media e cosa viene tralasciato.

It's also important here to distinguish between what's possible to know and understand firsthand from information that must be delivered second-, third-, fourth-hand by a various media; that is, mediated information, which is more and more the case. I mean, we know less and less about the world firsthand than we do through other sources of information.

six corporations control 90 percent of what we read, watch, or listen to. Six corporations. It's a little bit mystifying for me to put it that way. When I say six corporations, it makes it sound as though there's nobody there really making decisions, but in fact corporations don't decide, people in them decide things. We'll talk about the ways in which these corporations decide things in a minute. In

ask you to think a little bit about what the media's products are, which I put out as a question before. Are they selling an entertainment thing? Are they selling news? Are they selling information? No. They're selling you. They're selling you to advertisers. You are their product. There's no question about that. So

Propaganda is to Democracy what violence is to Totalitarianism

I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).

It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.

Information is information, not matter or energy.

For any machine subject to a varied external environment to act effectively it is necessary that information concerning the results of its own action be furnished to it as part of the information on which it must continue to act.

I repeat, feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance. If these results are merely used as numerical data for the criticism of the system and its regulation, we have the simple feedback of the control engineers. If, however, the information which proceeds backward from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may well be called learning.

as efficient as communications' mechanisms become, they are still, as they have always been, subject to the overwhelming tendency for entropy to increase, for information to leak in transit, unless certain external agents are introduced to control it. I have already referred to an interesting view of language made by a cybernetically-minded philologist—that speech is a joint game by the talker and the listener against the forces of confusion.

Even the atheistic, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins admitted that life appears to have been designed and that an origin one–celled animal has a thousand sets of Encyclopedias full of genetic information in it!

We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.

We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we're starting to behave as if we've reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

The nineties were a golden age for metropolitan newspapers and glossy magazines, yet most copies were destroyed or recycled within a month and never converted to digital files. It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.

There are entrenched ideas (both positive and negative) about what the internet is, conceded even by those who disagree with the veracity of the assertions: the way it refigures politics and social organization, the degree to which it alters the experience of adolescence, its contradictory ability to connect and estrange simultaneously, and its overall acceleration of the news cycle.

We now have immediate access to all possible facts. Which is almost the same as having none at all.

I'm sure I could have read the entire four-thousand-page plot summarized in four hundred words on Wikipedia, or I could simply walk into any high school and ask a few questions of the first kid I find who isn't smoking crystal meth.

In other words, people who don't know better are often wrong by accident, and people who do know better are sometimes wrong on purpose—and whenever a modern news story explodes, everyone recognizes that possibility. But we question this far less when the information comes from the past. It's so hard to get viable info about pre-twentieth-century life that any nugget is reflexively taken at face value.

Over time,[*] the Google algorithm created something that had never previously existed: a consensus about the shared understanding of everything.

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

Some people still think knowledge is power.

The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you'd be ruined. Overdosed on information.

they should let some people into the library by prescription only